LMR’s tongue-in-cheek attempt at making it into the Guinness Book of Records. The pattern is shown spells “USC” in Braille. Since the AFM is blind and reads by touching, this is not unreasonable. The particles are colloidal gold balls of 15 nm diameter, on a mica surface coated with poly-L-lysine. Manipulation was done with the AFM in the air at room temperature, with our usual protocol, which involves turning the feedback off and on and pushing the particles. The placement of particles is more accurate than in the older USC pattern on this web page and reflects the state of the art in our lab in the Spring of 1998. The shading is a standard “pseudo-3D” image-processing effect.
Reference: A. A. G. Requicha, “Nanoparticle patterns”, J. Nanoparticle Research, Vol.1, No.3. pp. 321-323, 1999.
